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Books in Brief: NONFICTION

DIRT The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. By William Bryant Logan. Riverhead/Putnam, $22.95.

Even someone who can't tell a flocculated benthic from a haploquod soil will find much of interest in William Bryant Logan's "Dirt," a word he prefers to the more refined "soil" or "earth." As he writes, human bodies belong to and depend on dirt. The ninth-century Persian physician Rhazes placed his infirmary on the spot where meat rotted the most rapidly; it is now believed that such sites were especially high in penicillium. (Today, Mr. Logan writes, many grave sites are toxic neighbors not because of the putrefaction of corpses but because of the leeching of formaldehyde.) Farmers used to taste dirt to judge its acidity; this country's industrial might rested on the richness of Midwestern soils, writes Mr. Logan, the environmental columnist at House Beautiful, just as the depletion of Mesopotamian and Roman fields marked the decline of those empires. "We spend our lives hurrying away from the real, as though it were deadly to us" he writes. "But the soil is all of the earth that is really ours." DAVID WALTON

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A version of this review appears in print on January 7, 1996, on page 007021 of the National edition with the headline: Books in Brief: NONFICTION. Today's Paper|Subscribe